Poetry Quotes

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.

When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.

I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.